Rating the Songs
When starting out our survey, we searched online for known datasets that included musical pieces that were dissected on their musical components. This was important as we wanted to compare musical sophistication with musical pieces and we needed information about the structure of these pieces. Since this yielded no results, we decided to each supply 5 instrumental songs to a playlist on Spotify. These songs needed to be instrumental to control for the influence of language on the perception of beauty. After we compiled 30 songs, we then used 3 musical experts with more than 10 years of formal training to rate them on 9 components on a 10-point Likert-scale, copying the method used in the article of Aljanaki et al. (2016). The following components were:
Tempo: the general pulse of the song, ranging from very slow (1) to very fast (10)
Articulation: The rhythmic articulation of each song, ranging from very staccato (1) to completely legato (10), staccato are separate notes with rests in between, legato notes are notes that are strung together.
Mode: overall mode and feel of the songs, ranging from minor (1) to major (10)
Intensity: overall loudness and crescendos and decrescendos in a song, ranging from 1 (pianissimo) to 10 (fortissimo)
Tonalness: overall tonalness of the composition, ranging from (1) atonal, with no discernable mode or key to tonal (10) with no use of “outside” extensions and very clear discernable key and mode
Pitch: overall distribution of the pitches, ranging from all bass (1) to all treble (10)
Melody: overall presence and dominance of melody, ranging from very unmelodious (1) to very melodious (10)
Rhythmic Clarity: overall presence of a pulse, ranging from very vague (1) to very firm (10)
Rhythmic Complexity: the extent to which different meters, odd tempo’s or complex rhytmic patterns are utilized, ranging from very simple (1) to very complex (10)
After all songs were rated, we selected 15 songs to include on our survey based on A) Feature Representability and B) Reliability
A) Feature Representability
The panel on the right is interactive, hover over a point with your mouse to find out more
The combined box and jitterplot shows the overall distribution of the characteristics of the selected songs. The boxplot represents the feature values of all 30 songs. The jitterplot shows the feature values of the 15 songs we selected for our survey.
Examining the jitterplot, it becomes apparent that our selection covers quite a large range for most components, with a range of around 6 for most components. Certain interest should be given towards the component of Pitch, which features mostly average Bass/Treble compositions, with 1 lower range song.
Overall this looks to be an okay distribution of songs, given that the playlist was compiled by 6 different people with different preferences. For some components however, a more extreme rating would be preferred so we would’ve had more room to examine the eventual class differences.